Judge Dismisses Pulse Survivors' Suit Against Social Media Companies

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Pulse shooting survivors and victims' families against social media companies, which the plaintiffs alleged had aided in gunman Omar Mateen's radicalization.

In U.S. District Court in Michigan, where the suit was filed, Judge David M. Lawson Friday issued an order to dismiss the suit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google, the Orlando Sentinel reports. It came the same day that a jury in a Florida federal court acquitted Mateen's widow, Noor Salman, of aiding and abetting his crime at the Orlando gay nightclub, where he killed 49 people and wounded 53 before dying in a shootout with police June 12, 2016.

Four survivors of the shooting and family members of nine victims sued the media companies in December 2016, claiming the companies knew "that ISIS members and its official news outlets use numerous accounts" on their platforms to "publish the organization's messages and to recruit and 'radicalize' persons such as Mateen." Mateen pledged allegiance to the terrorist group - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - in a 911 call during the attack.

The plaintiffs contended the companies "aided and abetted" Mateen's radicalization. At Salman's trial, evidence was presented that Mateen did internet searches related to ISIS.

But Lawson was not convinced of a direct connection between the online material and the shooting. He "wrote in his dismissal that that there is no definitive evidence suggesting that the material Mateen saw online directly led to the attack, 'other than that the principles espoused in them motivated Mateen to carry out the dreadful act,'" the Sentinel reports. The judge concluded that Mateen developed the idea for the attack "in isolation, when he 'self-radicalized' by perusing Internet postings, and then acted on his self-informed radical sentiments."